Two of her siblings did not reach adulthood, and her father played favorites with his two surviving children, Childs Frick (1883–1965) and Helen.
[2] The Library houses photographs and archival records that document the history of Western art, many works of which were lost during World Wars I and II.
In 1908, she requested that her debutante gift from her father be a donation of land to the city of Pittsburgh for the purpose of becoming a public park.
[3] In the 1950s, she made her own land donation and established Westmoreland Sanctuary, a nature preserve in Mount Kisco, New York.
[15] Helen decided to join the war effort: she applied for and received permission to establish a Frick unit under the Red Cross.
With four other women, Helen left for France in November 1917, arriving in Paris in December where she went to work immediately helping to wrap 150,000 Christmas packages being sent to soldiers at the front.
[10] She chose never to marry and, on her father's death in 1919, when she was 31, she inherited $38 million,[6] making her the country's wealthiest unmarried woman.
Her mother and older brother, Childs Frick, received considerably less, which would cause ongoing tension and conflict for Helen in future years.
In the meantime, she bought a farm in Bedford Village, New York, and joined the exclusively male board of the Frick collection.
[17] She devoted her adult life to defending her father's public image from attack and continuing his tradition of philanthropy.
[19] In London Robert Witt (who went on to found the Courtauld Institute of Art) showed her the Library of Reproductions for the National Gallery, which held 150,000 photographs, spanning six centuries.
Upon her return to New York began assembling an archive of 13,000 records, beginning with the Frick family collection of catalogs, postcards and photographs, mounting each reproduction and labeling it with information about artist, provenance, exhibition histories for future reference.
"[18] She converted the mansion's basement bowling alley to store the collection, and despite its location it soon gained a reputation among art historians.
"[21] She went on to endow and found the university's teaching collection in 1928,[9] and continued to give Bowman funds to pay workers to complete what eventually came to be called the Cathedral of Learning.
[22] Early in the 1930s, after the 1931 death of her mother, she hired John Russell Pope to expand of the Frick Reference Library into two adjacent townhouses.
The two fought over the manner in which the house should be transformed into a museum, whether the costly furniture should be kept (she wanted it, he did not), and Helen resisted his efforts to add pieces from his own collection.
As early as 1943, the Committee for the Protection of Cultural Treasures in War Areas was consulting with the library, compiling lists for the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program, which located, identified and returned looted art at the end of World War II.
[25] A dispute eventually severed the relationship with the university, involving the employment of Germans – Helen's World War I experience instilled an intense dislike of Germans she never overcame – in addition to the university's acquisition of modern art, which she equally disliked.
[9] Notoriously reclusive during her last years, she died at her Clayton home in Pittsburgh at age 96 on November 9, 1984, leaving a personal estate estimated to be worth $15 million.
Clayton's second floor contains personal family archives spanning almost a century, which proved to be useful to architects when, after Helen's death, the house underwent a full restoration to its original state before opening to the public as a museum.